China's Elite Coaches And Sport Scientists Visiting UConn

October 15, 2013|BY WILLIAM WEIR, bweir@courant.com, The Hartford Courant

STORRS — About 50 of China'smost elite coaches and sports scientists are visiting the University of Connecticut this week to learn more about how athletes are trained in the U.S.

Half of the group are Olympic coaches and half are sports scientists selected by China's State General Administration of Sports to work with the coaches and athletes.

Tuesday, they toured UConn's kinesiology department, where faculty study exercise science, sports nutrition, athletic training and physical therapy. Through interpreters, the visitors heard about the work at the Korey Stringer Institute, which currently is working on getting states to agree to stricter guidelines on high school athletes training in hot weather.

At UConn's Neag School of Education, William Kraemer, a professor of kinesiology, demonstrated the isokinetic dynamometer, a machine that measures the strength of different muscles. He and Carl Maresh, head of UConn's Kinesiology Department, helped orchestrate the visit. Kraemer said the visit is a sign that the world of sports is no longer as secretive as it once was, particularly during the Cold War when countries carefully guarded their training secrets.

"I think there's less mystery about how things can be done worldwide," Kraemer said.

Robert Huggins, director of elite athlete health and performance at the Korey Stringer Institute, said he had a chance to speak with one of the scientists from China and they compared notes "in our own broken languages" on hormone changes in athletes. He said he is looking forward to meeting further with the delegates during their visit to learn about how they do things in China.

"I think they're far ahead of us as far as the use of technology in sports," Huggins said.

The visitors were treated to lunch at Geno's Grill, where UConn women's basketball coach Geno Auriemma, who owns the restaurant, told them that he has spent time with China's national basketball team and has been "very, very impressed with how hard and how intense their training regimen is."

"The world is getting smaller, as you know," Auriemma said. "What we have done here in America for basketball, it used to be just an American sport, and now because of the NBA and people like [former Houston Rockets star] Yao Ming, it's become a world sport. And I don't think there's another country in the world that has embraced basketball, other than America, more than the people of China have."

Xia Lunhao, division director of the Sports Officials Training Center for the General Administration of Sport in China, said through an interpreter that the training techniques at UConn were much more sophisticated than he had expected. He said he hopes to gain a better understanding of how UConn applies the study of kinesiology to sports, which is something that hasn't been done much in China.

Xia said the coaches and scientists visiting UConn this week specialize in swimming, track and field, wrestling, judo and boxing.

Toward the end of the tour, they spent a few minutes watching the first full practice of the season of UConn's men's and women's basketball teams.

Maresh said he hopes that he and other UConn faculty will get to visit some of the sports science research centers in China next year. Speaking with the delegates, Maresh said it was interesting to hear about different approaches to sports.

"I think some of the scientists here, they're intrigued by how we train," he said, adding that the Chinese basketball teams tend to train for much longer hours than U.S. teams.